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Date:      Mon, 2 Jul 2001 21:11:06 -0500
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Andrew Reid <andrew.reid@plug.cx>
Cc:        Chris Fedde <chris@fedde.littleton.co.us>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD and surviving unclean shutdowns
Message-ID:  <20010702211105.A325@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <993530891.1187.0.camel@percible.alfred.cx>; from andrew.reid@plug.cx on Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 02:18:11PM %2B0930
References:  <200106260448.f5Q4m5O24533@fedde.littleton.co.us> <993530891.1187.0.camel@percible.alfred.cx>

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On Tuesday, 26 June 2001 at 14:18:11 +0930, Andrew Reid wrote:
> On 25 Jun 2001 22:48:04 -0600, Chris Fedde wrote:
>
>> FreeBSD with softupdates turned on will usually recover well from
>> a crash.  Also on highly available critical systems I would not
>> choose to run software raid. Better to have hardware raid running 0+1 if you
>> need it or just buy big disks.   With sendmail you can run multiqueue
>> with symbolic links to "subqueues" on each disk.
>
> How 'bout Vinum? Vinum seems to outperform some hardware RAID cards.
> Greg, is Vinum from a reliability point of view in high availability
> servers?

If you want a reply from me, please include me explicitly in the To:
or Cc: headers; that will at the very least get a faster reply.

Well, I don't quite understand that question.  Yes, some RAID cards
seem to have suboptimal performance.  Vinum handles power failures
quite well; Andrew and I share a power "provider", and it's had plenty
of exercise.  But the real issue here isn't Vinum, it's the file
system.

There are many areas where both FreeBSD and Linux people say "we're
better than you".  I don't think crash recovery is one of them.  About
a year ago, somebody in Germany told people at the German magazine c't
that FreeBSD would always recover from an unplanned shutdown, so they
went out to test it.  We cringed when we read it: 180 power offs and
reboots.  But their verdict was, yes, FreeBSD really does survive
unclean shutdowns.  I suspect that they didn't check for data loss,
just for metadata integrity, but that's still a far cry from what I've
seen with Linux.

>> Also as you know now it might be a good idea to invest in a sensaphone or
>> some otherway of having your machine room tell you it is breaking
>
> Hmm.. I'm looking into SMS alerts now.

You'll also need a generator.

>> BTW I didn't realize that christmas island was 9.5 hours east.
>
> Christmas Island isn't, but South Australia is :-)

In the winter.

Greg
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